Can a word really be untranslatable?

There’s no such thing as an untranslatable word. There, I’ve said it. Despite all the memes,blogs, and books to the contrary, all language is inherently translatable. However, whether the broader meaning of a text – the jokes, philosophies, and cultural peculiarities of its language – is translatable depends almost entirely on the individual with their nose in the dictionary (not to mention the dictionary itself).

When we say that a word is untranslatable, we tend to mean that it lacks an exact or word-for-word equivalent in our own language. In our desire to make everyone and everything understood, we sometimes forget that languages are living, writhing beasts: they evolve and mutate at such a rate that their genetic make-up is by nature very different, and it is almost impossible to pin them down. Although we can spot many commonalities between languages (just ask a friendly polyglot), there are also countless words that resist comparison. We are attracted to these outliers because they seem to fill the gaps in our own language and – if they originate from lands that are unfamiliar to us – they appear to unlock the secrets of other, distant cultures.

Nesting-doll words in Russian

As far as languages lacking like-for-like English equivalents go, Russian is as rich as any. It is a real matrioshka (матрёшка) language, formed by wrapping prefixes and suffixes around a small but solid core. Unpacking the meaning of these nesting-doll nouns and verbs is – like much of Russian – satisfyingly logical (although try telling that to a learner who’s grappling with irregular genitive plurals).

Propit’ (пропить) – meaning ‘to squander on drink’ – combines the verb ‘to drink’ with the prefix pro-, often added to root words in order to indicate loss or failure (just look at proigrat’, or проиграть: ‘to lose a game’). In some contexts we might translate propit’ as ‘drink away’ – for example, on propil zarplatu (он пропил зарплату) becomes ‘he drank away his salary’. In English we can drink away our money, our savings, or our fortune (and perhaps even all three), but our language doesn’t afford us the same flexibility – or economy – as propit’. In two words – propil kvartiru (пропил квартиру, lit. drank away the flat) – a Russian speaker can explain that his acquaintance ‘sold his flat and spent his profit on alcohol’.

One word, many meanings

It’s unfortunate that some of Russian’s most interesting words are also its most depressing. Toska (тоска) is melancholy, anguish, boredom, ennui, yearning, and nostalgia in two short syllables: it’s the pits. Toska makes the cut because although it has multiple possible translations, there is no one English word that manages to convey this sense of pining, misery, and gut-wrenching sorrow. In Russian literature and philosophy, toska is a loaded noun that is often used to describe the Russian condition – although if you’re planning an extended trip to Yakutsk, you’re perhaps more likely to use it in the phrase toska po rodine (тоска по родине), or homesickness.

Considering these two brief examples, it’s easy to see how inferences stemming from so-called ‘untranslatable’ words could be damaging to a culture’s reputation. Happily, there’s much more to Russian than toska and propit’ – and the mere existence of these words says very little about the frequency with which Russian speakers are likely to drown their sorrows around the kitchen table.

Falling leaves

Despite being the language of a nation famed for its snow, Russian is the keeper of one of the most satisfying autumnal words I know: listopad (листопад), meaning ‘the falling of the leaves.’ Listopad – like snegopad (снегопад, meaning snowfall) – takes its root from the verb padat’ (падать, or fall), and combines it with the noun list’ (лист,leaf) to create a word that for some reason has no commonly used English equivalent. Yes, we have the delightful defoliation in our vocabulary, but it is more formal in register and is used much less frequently. New England may be famed for its foliage, but we rarely talk about its defoliation, whereas legendary Soviet (and now Russian) pop singer Alla Pugacheva has even released a song called Ostorozhno, listopad! (Осторожно, листопад!) – perhaps best translated as ‘Watch out, falling leaves!’ The compound noun leaf-fall does also exist in English (as discovered when researching for this article), but is rarely used in everyday English, and certainly doesn’t feature in the title of a pop song.

Wide open spaces

If New England could do with listopad, then perhaps the American Midwest might benefit from the word prostor (простор), meaning spaciousness, space, and freedom. Prostor goes hand-in-hand with the wild, limitless expanses of the Russian steppe – usually in the phrase stepnye prostory (степные просторы), which means exactly that. However, prostor isn’t just about space: it could also be used in a phrase like emu v derevne prostor (ему в деревне простор), meaning ‘in the countryside, he has the freedom to roam’.

Our increasingly connected lifestyles give us more and more opportunities to explore the vast prostor of other languages. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) famously said that ‘the limits of my language are the limits of my world’, and every now and then a popular blog or meme might make us wonder if the grass really is greener on the other side. Do we have all the words we need? As far as languages are concerned, I know that I’ll never be an odnoliub (однолюб): someone who only has one love in his or her life, or someone who is only capable of loving one at a time. What about you?

The opinions and other information contained in OxfordWords blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press.

AuthorCaroline JamesCaroline James is an Editor in the English Language Teaching division at Oxford University Press.

Further Reading

Comments

very interesting article. By the way, do you know that Listopad in Polish means November. you can translate it literally as falling of leaves but we don’t use this word at that meaning

David Crosbie

A good example of the difficulty of translation. In some related languages, Listopad ‘means’ October.

Tom Butcher

“There’s no such thing as an untranslatable word.”

Depends on how you look at it really.
I sometimes translate from Spanish to English, and have been asked to translate texts about bullfighting. Many of the technical words used in Spanish when talking about bullfighting have no equivalent in English, simply because bullfighting isn’t as culturally significant in English speaking countries. These terms can be explained but not directly translated. When I did some research to find out how English-speaking aficionados deal with this problem I found that they use the Spanish words directly without translating them.
So, does this mean that these terms have passed into the English language – in which case they are not “untranslatable”? Or does the existence of foreign words in a language disprove the assertion that there’s no such thing as an untranslatable word?

http://goo.gl/Gb8Ne Ved from Victoria Institutions

I do not want to sound insulting to a learned person. However, it is not true that all words are translatable. In fact, most words in feudal languages, of Asia, and other places cannot be translated into English. In fact, I would say that if one were to reach out to the animal communication with modern technology, it might seem that the words and usages therein are like English. Yet, it is not true. As an independence researcher on language, language codes etc. I can categorically say that many Asian language words are not translatable into English. What comes out into English is only a extreme form of simplification, devoid of powerful frill codes that Asian feudal languages have. I would request the English scholor to see my own writings in this regard: 1. March of the Evil Empires: English versus the feudal languages. https://archive.org/details/March_20131012

Interesting article, but in reality it dances around the issue. In the end, even after having read the article, I still feel the same as I had before I read it: any word can be translated, of course, but whether the translation is accurate is still up to intense debate. I’ve seen a Rumi poem translated with the word computer in it. Obviously not literal, but again obviously not intending for a literal translation. Can one say that the word in the poem was translated correctly? I can guarantee that Rumi didn’t write poetry about computers in the 13th century, but in the end it will be a circular argument. There will always be words with no counterparts in other languages, and, for instance, in my example, Persian is an incredibly difficult language to translate into English.

Having said all of that I’m still happy with what we have: it provides for a rich diversity in the translations that we get to read, and in many cases, for our polyglots, a desire to read a work in its original language. Having embarked on a desire to read more of the classics I have already run into the importance of translations, and got knee deep in the bloody arguments that ensue in the forums debating one translation over another. The bottom line is that anything can be translated, but whether or not a specific translation actually represents the authors original intent will, I believe, still be argued for many ages to come.

Mererid Williams

There is a verb pattern in Welsh that I have a very hard time trying to explain to my students, simply because the concept doesn’t exist in English. It is a past particle of the verb ‘to be’, but it is neither imperfect, perfect, perfect past nor simple past – but a little bit of each in some ways, and none of them at all at the same time. It’s one thing to translate a concrete noun that doesn’t exist in another language – there are ways around this. But trying to translate a very abstract word, that is based on a philosophy that is so embedded in a culture’s psyche, is somewhat trickier. I was? Kind of. I have been? Not really. I had been? Nearly. I spent time being? Close, but not quite. etc etc Frustrating for both teacher and student!

Palwasha

I would argue there are words the concept of which doesn’t even exist in all languages. Take religious and cultural words as example.

Ben

I don’t get it. Your article seems to be a wonderfully extensive disproof of the premise it starts with. Example after richly characterized example of Russian words that have no exact or effective translation into English. Long-winded explanations, perhaps, but those are not translations. I can’t imagine the author could believe or even entertain that premise, though. Anyone who knows anything about languages knows that they are not adequately intertranslatable. And also that one’s own language has huge gaps where words are lacking to represent real things or events or feelings. Often one can find those words in other languages. What am I missing here???

I asked my wife, a native-speaker teacher of Russian, what толка means. ‘Nostalgia’ she replied. What about ‘ennui’? ‘Well, at the time of Pushkin…’ So it’s a question of a word not translating easily at different times in the same language. ‘Yearning’ she’ll accept as a contemporary meaning, but not ‘boredom’. The same is true of листопад, which used to mean ‘October’, but a long time ago. Alla Pugacheva is unlikely to have had this in mind, but she could have been thinking of Ukrainian and/or Belarussian where it still means ‘November’.

Elizabeth Guyatt

I’ve had a lot of fun thinking about specifically Russian words recently (or at least words with no direct or near one-word equivalent in English). One of my favourite challenges is translating настроение – the usual direct translation of “mood” rarely seems to sound natural or even make sense in English.

I read The Master and Margarita in English first, and then in (the original) Russian: I remember how funny I found the word интуристы (inturisty – a stump compound meaning foreign tourists); it conveyed so much more than the more neutral translation “foreign visitors.” The original felt playful and was so much more vivid, with its connotations of the Интурист hotel in the centre of Moscow.